Enforcing the law and keeping tribal members safe is always a challenge on the sprawling Pine Ridge Reservation. But a surge of violence crime over the last year – particularly in Pine Ridge Village – has tribal officials searching for help.
Members of the Oglala Lakota Tribal Council acted Wednesday on a request for help from Pine Ridge Village residents made through the tribe’s Law and Order Committee. The council approved a resolution asking the Federal Bureau of Indian Affairs to send law enforcement officers to the reservation to bolster the tribe’s 38-members police force.
Tribal President John Yellow Bird Steele said just last weekend there was another victim of violence at Pine Ridge.
"We had a young man that was beaten by three others last weekend, with a hoe,” Yellow Bird Steele said. “And this garden hoe cut him up. And he was knocked unconscious. And he's in Rapid City Regional Hospital right now."
Steele says that just because more than one person sometimes gang up on someone else doesn’t necessarily mean it's actual gang action.
"They're complaining about gangs out there,” Steele said. “But it's not really gangs. It's guys who hang together and drink together and do drugs together."
And sometimes, tribal officials say, those guys attack others together.
While the string of violent criminal acts have focused the need for increased law enforcement on Pine Ridge Village, tribal council members from other districts say more officers are needed across the reservation.
Some tribal members balked at the resolution being aimed at Pine Ridge Village, saying they couldn’t support it unless other areas were added to the request. But the resolution passed on a 10-6 vote.
Tribal officials say 38 tribal police officers are stretched thin trying to cover more than three million acres, particularly at a time of increased drug abuse and an overall culture that seems more inclined toward violence.